Development of a Personal Mobility Vehicle to Improve the Quality of Life

In today’s aging society, the importance of assistance for the people with limited mobility is acknowledged. Therefore, the personal mobility vehicle (PMV) for the people with limited mobility is proposed in this paper. Proposed PMV is propelled by kicking motion with power assisted wheels. It aims to assist short distance transportation in urban area e.g. moving from a home to a train station. By using a folding mechanism, it will be possible to carry the vehicle on public transportations and this will help to extend the area of the user’s activities. In this paper, the overview of our developed PMV and the results of preliminary experiments are introduced.